The Messenger will shut down less than a year after launching news site: ‘One of the biggest busts of all time’
NY Post
Money-bleeding start-up The Messenger — the news site that launched to great fanfare last May — was expected to shut down Wednesday, according to a source close to the situation.
“The site will go dark,” an insider at the publication told The Post, adding that none of the roughly 300 staffers will get severance.
Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein, who launched the site in May after raising $50 million, had been scrambling to secure funding this week as employees braced to hear whether the company would avert disaster, as The Post previously reported.
A rep for the Messenger did not comment.
“This will go down as one of the biggest busts of all time,” a media expert said. “The Messenger will be remembered as the Titanic of publishing disasters.”
Finkelstein had big dreams of turning the Messenger into a major centrist news outlet that would include hiring around 550 journalists within a year and compete with the likes of The Los Angeles Times.
